This Review presents a narrative outlining what happened over recent decades to bring Ireland to where it is today, where exactly Ireland finds itself now, where Ireland should go into the future and what it needs to do ...

Banks within Europe have become larger and more international. We use a micro data set to investigate the impact of size on banks Net Interest Margin and show larger banks lower borrowing costs for firms which raises ...

The financial crisis of the last three years has seen a dramatic change in the EU financial sector. Since the early 1990s, with the completion of the internal market, there had been a growing trend towards an EU financial ...

Certain developments in the electricity sector may result in suboptimal operation of base-load generating units in countries
worldwide. Despite the fact they were not designed to operate in a flexible manner, increasing ...

This paper critically examines initial applications of Behavioural Economics (BE) to policymaking. It focuses primarily but not exclusively on what can be learnt from the early adopters of policies inspired by BE, notably ...

Over the last decade Irish tax policy has undergone dramatic shifts. As the economy boomed in the early 2000s, income tax rates were reduced, tax credits were increased and the standard rate band was widened. Social welfare ...

This study addresses two key issues in Irish social and economic policy. These are:
(i) the need to reform and develop our taxation system so that it becomes fairer and;
(ii)the need to address the issue of the `working ...

In this paper we use annual time series data from 1960 to 2008 to estimate the long run price and income elasticities underlying energy demand in Ireland. The Irish economy is divided into five sectors: residential, ...

Ireland is a facing a critical time in the formation of a robust renewable energy (RE) policy, due to its size, relative isolation, grid infrastructure, and fuel import dependency. The inherent intermittency and unpredictability ...

Research into the social cost of carbon emissions ? the marginal social damage from a tonne of emitted carbon ? has tended to focus on ?best guess? scenarios. Such scenarios generally ignore the potential for low-probability, ...

Using detailed plan-level data, this paper examines the choice, price and quality of broadband services available to consumers in Ireland over time. We find modest geographical (county level) variation in broadband services. ...

Using detailed plan-level data, this paper examines the choice, price and quality of broadband services available to consumers in Ireland over time. We find modest geographical (county level) variation in broadband services. ...

Climate change is an important problem. It would be desirable to have legislation that would put Ireland on a low-cost and equitable trajectory to a zero-carbon economy. The draft Climate Change Response Bill 2010 will not ...

Uncertainty plays a significant role in evaluating climate policy, and fat-tailed uncertainty may dominate policy advice. Should we make our utmost effort to prevent the arbitrarily large impacts of climate change under ...